


Awake

by shadowcat720



Category: Original Work
Genre: Demons, Family, Gen, cursed weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:13:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27554413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowcat720/pseuds/shadowcat720
Summary: Lana was always up late at night. She wished she didn’t have to be.
Kudos: 1





	Awake

Lana was a night-owl. She spent most nights doing things around the house.

Cleaning. Washing clothes. Re-arranging furniture yet again because it didn’t feel quite right where it was and the change felt like a breath of fresh air, at least until the next time she got that irresistible itch to move things around.

The front door opening would send her feet rushing down the stairs, through the hall, past the kitchen before she even registered the sound.

Her brother would be in the front hall hanging his coat up and removing his sword, shoulders slumped, hands shaking a little.

Lana often fantasised about throwing that horrible weapon into a volcano.

“Don’t track mud around. I just cleaned!” she would say if it had been raining.

He would laugh, because they both knew there was worse than mud on his boots and he always took them off right there, anyway.

She would look him over as he sat in the chair by the coatrack and removed his boots. She was looking for blood. Not the ink-black slimy blood that always stained his coat, trousers and boots, but dark red blood, vivid in the bright lights of the house.

She would be horrified and unsurprised when she would find it.

He would see her looking. “It’s nothing,” he would say.

_It’s nothing. I came home, didn’t I?_

Lana would insist on tending to his wounds (she knew more about such things now than she had ever wanted to). She would pester him into eating dinner (she said it was left-overs, but really, she had cooked it specifically for him).

“Why did you move everything?” he would ask with an exasperated sigh. “What was wrong with it before?”

“You’re a guy,” she would tell him. “You wouldn’t understand. Sometimes a girl just needs a change. I think I’m going to get some indoor plants to put in the living room. A bit of greenery will make it feel more lived-in.”

He would give her a look and shrug. “Whatever you think is best.” He had no time or energy to think about interior decorating.

He would go up to bed, watching where he was going because things were not where they had been when he had left before sunset.

Lana would go to the now-closed front door and look at the sword propped up against the wall.

It was a beautiful thing, all fancy, gold and shining red.

“I hate you,” she would tell it, tears welling up in her eyes. “Give me my brother back!” she would plead.

It just rested there and she knew better than to try to touch it. It didn’t like her any more than she liked it.

_Am I selfish?_ she would wonder as she sat in the chair by the sitting room window and drank a cup of tea that was supposed to be soothing. The wind would blow the lacy white curtains and she would imagine that she could hear the howls of demons in it.

What right did she have to want her brother to stop slaying the demons that roamed the night and killed innocent victims? So what if every time he picked up that sword it was ripping away a little of his life-force to keep for itself?

“Do the math, Lana,” she would tell herself. “One life lost to save many.”

A simple, logical equation.

A cold, cruel equation that didn’t take into account her brother’s easy smile, his generosity, all the things he could be and do that had been thrown away the moment he touched that cursed blade.

She would cry, finish her tea, then go and fetch the coat he’d left in the hall, because even when he came home uninjured there was always demon blood on his clothes and they needed to be cleaned.

She would thank God that he had come home tonight and pray for a miracle. The kind of miracle which meant there would never be a night where she would stay up until dawn and that front door would never open.


End file.
